1872

Over the years there have been lots of entertainment columns written on the subject of promotional blurbs, to the point where you have to wonder what the point of them still is. In our time the pull quote of critical praise has become such debased coin that they’re widely recognized as not only worthless but laughable. Even a sticker announcing that a book has won some big literary prize is meaningless. Who cares what the last book was that won the National Book Award or Man Booker Prize? What does it matter that a book was named one of the New York Times’ Best Books of the Year? I guess it helps move a few copies, and as far as advertising is concerned it’s about all that publishers can do, but that’s it.

You can scrape the bottom of a deep barrel though in trawling for pull quotes. To the point where the blurbs I find on most new DVDs are usually from sources I’ve never heard of. The ratings from Rotten Tomatoes probably mean more, which isn’t saying much. I don’t even know if these are real people writing the “reviews” that quotes are drawn from now, as I think it’s something an AI could probably do more effectively, and better. A point that the team promoting Megalopolis apparently took to heart.

I say this because the cover of 1872 has “A rootin’ tootin’ good time” appearing on it, a bit of ad writing that comes courtesy of IGN.com, which as far as I can tell is just a blurb farm now. Then on the back cover we get “I’m not a fan of Westerns, but this comic book may have just changed my opinion of them,” which is attributed to ComicWow.com, a site that was offline when I went to find out if the blurb had actually come from a review and who might have written it.

Anyway, this is all beside the point. It’s just sort of a pet peeve of mind I thought I’d mention. I mean, there’s a really misleading bit of information scratched onto the Boot Hill tombstone on the cover too, but I won’t get after them for that.

I’m not even going to try to put 1872 into its context within the Marvel Secret Wars/Battleworld multiverse because that’s about as deep a rabbit hole as you can head down. Suffice it to say that we’re in the Old (and Wild) West, specifically the company town of Timely, which is populated by various Marvel superheroes and villains in period dress. Steve Rogers is the sheriff, Tony Stark is the town drunk, Bruce Banner is an apothecary, Natasha Romanov is the widow of former sheriff Bucky Barnes. Among the bad guys is Kingpin as the mayor and Wilson Fisk with his gang of hired guns: Bullseye, Grizzly, Electra, and Doctor Octopus.

The centre of the story though is Red Wolf, a Native American out to blow up the Roxxon Corporation’s dam. Red Wolf isn’t a very well-known Marvel hero, so also included in this collected edition of the 1872 series is his origin story from way back in Avengers #80 (1970, and not 1963 as is stated on the back cover), as well as a later appearance in Marvel Comics Presents #170.

I did like the story here. It’s straightforward while at the same time being clever in how it adapts characters we’re familiar with to their new surroundings. I loved Doc Ock’s multiple-gun contraption, and the appearance of Vision in one of those fortune-telling booths. The storyline follows a standard Western formula, but it’s punched up with extra violence that has a lot of the characters being killed. Steve Rogers is even thrown into a hog pen, where he gets eaten! That was a real shocker.

Not an epic Western maybe, but a great B-film that hits all its marks and has a genuinely fresh spin on the action by putting the old characters in some new costumes. Good stuff! And if anyone wants they can blurb that.

Graphicalex